Free Book Friday: The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer

Welcome to this week’s?Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Traviskurowski for getting a free copy of Flying Zeppelins by Joe R. Lansdale.

This week, we are giving away The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer. Compared by critics to Borges, Nabokov, and Kafka, inventive contemporary fantasist Jeff VanderMeer continues to amaze with this surreal, innovative, and absurdist gathering of award-winning short fiction. Exotic beasts and improbable travelers roam restlessly through these darkly diverting and finely-honed tales. Highlights include “The Situation,” in which a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta-ray to be used for educational purposes (once described as Dilbert meets Gormenghast); “Three Days in a Border Town,” where a sharpshooter seeks the truth about her husband in an elusive floating City beyond a far-future horizon; “Errata,” following an oddly-familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world. Also included are two stories original to this collection, including “The Quickening,” in which a lonely child is torn between familial obligation and a wounded talking rabbit. Chimerical and hypnotic, VanderMeer leads readers through the postmodern into a new literature of the imagination.

Tachyon is an independent publisher of science fiction and fantasy for grown-ups. Their books are unique, challenging, and have high literary value. Their books are also a lot of fun. Tachyon is known for their canonic anthologies that redefine everything from the Victorian whimsies of Steampunk to the “lit-fi” world of Slipstream. In publishing risky story collections they’ve helped to spark a short fiction renaissance. They’ve commissioned innovative original novels and brought out-of-print classics to a new generation of readers. Their award-winning authors include Peter S. Beagle, Charles de Lint, Michael Moorcock, Kage Baker, James Morrow, Tim Powers, Nancy Kress, Cory Doctorow, Carol Emshwiller, Thomas M. Disch, and many more. In 2010, Tachyon is celebrating fifteen years of publishing smart science fiction and fantasy. Stick around, they’re just getting started.

To enter the giveaway, all you have to do is comment in the space below. Make sure to tell us your email address so we can contact you if you win! We also recommend doing the following:

i’ll have it (i should add “whether you give it to me or not”, though i know you will–)

Matt Betts

This really sounds interesting. I’m excited to read it.

Jason Mashak

Compared to Kafka? Then I NEED this book. I live on Kafka’s Bohemian turf, and even his ghost has been sent into exile by empty-headed trustafarian tourist hipsters with pens & keyboards whining about their parents’ money running out.